The opening scenes of John
M. Stahl’s Only Yesterday plunge the viewer into the midst of the 1929
market collapse, fluidly capturing a high-society New York milieu of aggressive
superficiality going over a cliff, including a memorably extended single shot
of a devastated man walking from the exchange floor, stopping in a daze for a
shoe shine, and leaving a big tip before walking into a restroom from which a
gunshot then rings out. John Boles’s James Emerson is introduced as another ruined
investor on the verge of suicide, before discovering a newly-delivered letter
on his desk that takes us into the flashbacks that form the main narrative, the
perspective now that of a young Southern woman, Mary Lane (Margaret Sullavan)
who falls for Emerson during WW1 while he’s at a military base before being
shipped out, has a child in his absence, then wrenchingly learns on his return
that he doesn’t even remember her, eventually accepting her lot as a single
mother. The contrast of urgent societal disarray and protracted personal endurance
is both ungainly and intriguing; likewise that between Mary’s clarity of
motivation and expression and Emerson’s relative ambiguity (deliberately or
not, it’s never entirely clear whether he’s a breathtakingly self-absorbed
sexual adventurer or rather an easily-swayed dolt). The misalignment of
perception and motivation culminates in grandly melodramatic fashion, the two “reunited”
and knowledge restored under circumstances that seal their separation; the
scenario’s improbability seeming less strained than it otherwise might, given
the film’s grounding in a then-current crisis that might likewise have been dismissed
as impossible if it hadn’t actually happened. The title perhaps sums up the sense
of fracture, attaching to a film concerned less with the collapsing of past and
present than with a life lived in full awareness of what might and should have been,
but was incomprehensibly denied.
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